Monday, March 26, 2012

Garbage Bags in Brooklyn and Matisse's Emotion

This is the corner of St. Marks and Grand when the garbage bags were out, as well as the sunshine.

Matisse said, "I do not create a woman, I make a picture." Pierre Schneider, comparing Matisse and Manet in terms of painting and the subject, goes on to write, "Yet the picture should not be painted to the detriment of the subject...This complete contradiction ["between the painting and the subject"] has to be--can only be--resolved by an act of intuition. Though Manet never expressed his thoughts on the nature of such an act, he would probably have agreed with the definition propounded by Matisse on numerous occasions: the identification of the subjective and the objective in the work, which expresses not the thing seen but the sensation--Matisse calls it "the emotion"--it triggers in the artist. For this to take place, the painter must renounce his acquired knowledge and let the unlooked-for enter into his picture. Decisive for Matisse was the role of what Mallarme, speaking of Manet, calls his "instinct" (and which he himself sometimes called the "unconscious").